Cost effective to upgrade?

Vidar

Vidar

Vidar

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I don't know much about laptops to be honest, However I currently own a Dell Vostro 1015, a sleek looking laptop in my opinion however it's performance is somewhat to be desired...

What I want to know is, is it cost effective to upgrade a laptop; faster processor, more ram etc?

Or should I part exchange it and find something more suitable out of the box?
 
Laptops are a harder to upgrade then desktops, harder to change items in them, limited stock of laptop parts making them more expensive. its up to you really. more ram and cpu might set you back between £60-£180 depending on what you have/want. you have to decide if that cost would be better off in a new laptop.

what spec is your laptop?
 
Best think to do is have a look and find out what the best CPU was fitted to that laptop as an option. For instance my laptop came with an i5, but i7 was an option so I could fit one at a later date.

But see the difference in the specs between your CPU and the better one, and see what the FSB is etc.

It's a bit hit and miss with laptops, but I upgraded my very old 1.5GHz Celeron laptop to a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, and my other laptop I upgraded from a 2.0GHz Turion to the dual core version :)
 
Do you know if its ddr2 or ddr3, if its ddr3 you can upgrade it from 1gb or 2gb to 4gb for £18, that should help out some.
 
Different sites seem to have different info, is there anyway of finding out for definate without opening it up etc? Am not comfortable working on laptops
 
Assuming you can drop a faster cpu in yours, and this will depend on motherboard and bios, you may get a healthy increase. Assume an extra 4gb memory will cost £20 and the processor £40-£70 then maybe a 7200rpm drive or SSD you could spend £120-£150ish.

Most laptops fetch £100-£150 second hand, even older ones with XP OS. Your one would probably get up to £200 assuming the specs you listed are right.

It is always worth considering selling your Laptop and buying a cheap new business laptop (good ones start at £350). Look at HP ProBooks, Toshiba Satellite Pros and Lenovo Thinkpads. Business notebooks often come in cheaper than home laptops.

The ones I have mentioned all have offers on at the moment which bring great systems in at around the £300 mark. You then get the benefits of new warranty and better hardware for a similar investment.
 
I know its an Intel Celeron 925, the board is apparantly a Dell Inc 0TFXK9, with 2GB DDR3-SDRAM at 1333Mhz with a 250GB Seagate.... Other than scrapping it which isnt really an option and getting a new one what would you guys recommend in order to increase performance without spending to much
 
You can upgrade it to a core duo CPU, i found a site saying these would work but get someone else to confirm this. (P7570, T6670, T6570, T5870) These are dual Cores betweeen 2.1 and 2.3 ghz so it will be a marked increase on the single you have now.

Giving a Quick look between £15 and £50 for the cpu on the bay. the t6570 being £15 for a dual core 2.1ghz cpu, its nearly twice as fast as the one you use now.

http://www.lapspecs.com/wiki/dell+vostro+1015


Upgrading to 4gb of ram for £18 you will onyl see a small improvemnt if you upgrade the ram and not the CPU.

You could also upgrade to an SSD, but thats a fairly expensive option for a good sized one.

Use this guide to take down your laptop.

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/vos1015/en/SM/index.htm

Hope that helps.

someone correct me if im wrong please.
 
This might sound stupid but if I replace the hard drive will I not have to get a new windows installation cd, the one that came with the laptop was a dell specific installation disk... does that not mean it wont take with the new components?


Just remember having issues upgrading store bought computers in the past.
 
NW_SKINHEAD said:
This might sound stupid but if I replace the hard drive will I not have to get a new windows installation cd, the one that came with the laptop was a dell specific installation disk... does that not mean it wont take with the new components?


Just remember having issues upgrading store bought computers in the past.
Click to expand...

What you could do is clone the recovery partition with something like Acronis and copy it onto the new disk.

Boot the recovery partition and perform a full system restore. This has worked for me in the past

EDIT: Actually I also needed to also install grub on the MBR in order to boot the recovery partition
 
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